Albert Speer served all twenty years of his sentence at Spandau Prison outside Berlin, despite the efforts by John J. McCloy, as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, to get Speer released earlier. In 1956 McCloy wrote to Speer’s wife, Margarete, “I have a very strong conviction that your husband should be released and would be very happy if I could do anything to expedite such a release.”
In prison Speer secretly worked on the memoirs he would publish upon his release. On pieces of toilet paper, cigarette wrappers, and paper scraps he jotted down recollections of his days working alongside Hitler and the inner circle. It was illegal to write and send unscreened notes out of Spandau, so Speer had his writing smuggled out by two sympathetic Dutch Red Cross nurses. The notes were delivered to Speer’s old friend and colleague Rudolf Wolters, a diehard Hitler loyalist living in Berlin. Over the course of twenty years Wolters painstakingly typed up tens of thousands of these individual paper scraps that Speer continued to send to him. After twenty years they amounted to a thousand-page manuscript, which Wolters turned over to Speer upon Speer’s release. With the advance payments Speer received on his memoirs—he would write two, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries—Speer became a wealthy man once again. He earned a reported 680,000 deutschmarks from Die Welt for serialization rights, and a reported $350,000 (roughly $2.4 million in 2013) advance for English-language book rights. Albert Speer bought a sports car and embarked on a new life as a successful author.
He never thanked or acknowledged Rudolf Wolters for his twenty years of work, at least not in his book and not publicly. A decade later, Speer defended this decision to his biographer, Gitta Sereny, saying “[I]t was for [Wolters’s] own protection.” Wolters’s son reported that when Wolters died, the last word he uttered was “Speer.”
After Speer sent Wernher von Braun a copy of Spandau, von Braun wrote a letter to his old friend and former boss at the Reich’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production, pointing out how divergent their lives had been over the past twenty years. While Speer had been at Spandau Prison, von Braun’s star had risen steadily. He thanked Speer for the book. “How often I thought of you during those last twenty long years when so much was happening in my life,” wrote von Braun.
When Siegfried Knemeyer learned that Albert Speer was out of prison, Knemeyer took a trip to visit his old friend in Germany. The last time the two men had seen each other was in Berlin in April 1945, when Knemeyer was helping Speer plot his escape to Greenland. In the years that Speer had been in prison, Knemeyer had been working for the United States—formerly the sworn enemy of both men. As an employee of the U.S. Air Force in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Knemeyer worked on classified and unclassified projects, won awards, and rose up through the ranks. For the air force, he established the Pilot Factors Program, which coordinated technologies as aircraft went from subsonic to supersonic flight. Upon his retirement in 1977, Pentagon officials awarded Knemeyer their highest civilian award, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award. Knemeyer died of emphysema two years later, on April 11, 1979. His last wish was that his body be “immediately taken to a crematory” and that no funeral be held. “He served his native country, Germany, and his adopted country, America, with equal enthusiasm and dedication,” said his son Sigurd Knemeyer.
To the end, Albert Speer denied that he had direct knowledge of the Holocaust. Sixty-seven years after interviewing Speer at the Ashcan interrogation facility in Luxembourg, John Dolibois still takes umbrage at this. “I asked [Speer] if he was at the Wannsee Conference at which Himmler announced the ‘Final Solution’ for eradicating Jews,” Dolibois explains. “In my opinion, anyone who was at that meeting could not say he knew nothing about extermination camps—like Auschwitz, Sobibor, Birkenau. Speer first denied being at Wannsee, then admitted [to me] he was there, but left before lunch and missed the important announcements. Others also asserted [Speer] was not telling the truth. I think he should have been hanged.”
Albert Speer died in a London hotel room in 1981. He was in town doing an interview for the BBC. “One seldom recognizes when the Devil puts his hand on your shoulder,” Albert Speer told James P. O’Donnell in a New York Times Magazine interview shortly after his release from Spandau. He was referring to Hitler but might have been talking about himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
What Lasts?